Intimate Converse in Baker Street

Intimate Converse in Baker Street by Chris Redmond “Were Holmes and Watson secretly gay lovers?” asked an e-mail message in mid-July 2014—one in a continuing trickle of inquiries from users of my Sherlockian.net website, some asking for basic information, others posing unanswerable questions about the detective’s role as solar myth or superhero, the way the character has been portrayed in recent films, or the chronology of Professor Moriarty. “I’ve heard that theory far too often,” the July message about homosexuality went on. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. Were they secret lovers or not? Were they just really good friends?” I told my correspondent that different Sherlockian experts or enthusiasts would likely give different answers to that question. I added, however, that I was confident Arthur Conan Doyle had not intended to portray the Baker Street duo as lovebirds. It was more common in the Victorian era than it is today, I said, for unrelated men to share living quarters out of friendship and, of course, fi- nancial need, and no one should read today’s social roles into a story of life in the 1880s. Of course, I could have said so much more. In particular, I could have traced the history of the “theory” about which my correspondent had been hearing “too often”—the hypothesis that Watson and Holmes were, indeed, linked by sexual ties as well as common interests and, as their friendship grew over the years, a deep and affectionate loyalty. This theory relies in part on wishful thinking, most of it surfacing in the past very few years, but there is a good deal more to be said. There are, to be sure, a few phrases and passages in the Canon that give it some credence. Although the detective and the doctor clearly have separate rooms at Baker Street—that is made clear from the beginning, the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet— proof is lacking that they always slept where they claimed to sleep. Away from home, they clearly share “a bedroom” at an inn in “The Speckled Band,” and “a large and comfortable double- bedded room” in “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Holmes touches 6 Watson’s wrist as they wait in suspense in “The Speckled Band,” he lays his hand “upon [Watson’s] arm” in The Hound of the Bas- kervilles and again in “The Devil’s Foot,” his fingers “clutch” Wat- son in “The Empty House,” the two friends walk arm-in-arm in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In “Charles Augustus Milverton,” Watson writes touchingly, “I felt Holmes’s hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake. .” More fancifully, Holmes says to Wat- son in “A Case of Identity” that “If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on . it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.” Queer things, indeed. The most important scene suggesting affection between Holmes and Watson appears in “The Three Garridebs.” Its lan- guage arguably carries sexual overtones: I felt a sudden hot sear as if a red-hot iron had been pressed to my thigh. Then my friend’s wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair. “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!” It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. It is perhaps little wonder that many enthusiasts long to see this scene dramatized by contemporary actors. The scene near the end of “The Devil’s Foot” is less emotional in the original text, although the Granada dramatization starring Jeremy Brett and Ed- ward Hardwicke adds a new level of intimacy by having Holmes address Watson as “John” at the moment of crisis. As best I can tell, the first expression in print of the idea that Watson and Holmes were lovers came with the publication of Lar- ry Townsend’s The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1971 (it was reissued in 1993). In that decade, an explicitly gay retell- ing of some of Holmes’s canonical adventures, no matter how ele- gantly done—and Townsend’s work was indisputably of high quality—was far from socially acceptable, and might well have 7 attracted censorious attention. Thus it came to be that when the newly established Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the (then) Metropolitan Central Library had a chance to acquire a copy, it was brought into Canada through special arrangements made by Eric Silk (“The Blue Carbuncle”), who was Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police. Silk arranged for an FBI official in Buf- falo to ship the book to him as “law enforcement documents,” avoiding the eyes of Canada Customs. At least, so I have been told—I wasn’t there, of course. The shabby maroon paperback vol- ume remains in the Toronto collection to this day, and perhaps raises fewer eyebrows than it once did. A number of canonical characters became gay in Townsend’s interpretation of matters, but above all he wrote of Holmes and Watson. His Watson says in an early passage: To the rest of the world, we were a pair of bachelor gentlemen sharing quarters because it was convenient and economical to do so. Between us, once the door at 221B Baker Street was closed against the world, we shared such moments of blissful content- ment I doubt anyone outside ourselves could have understood or believed. In 1988 came My Dearest Holmes by Rohase Piercy, which similarly reinterprets canonical cases and events as the experi- ences of a same-sex couple. It takes its title, of course, from the phrase “my dear Watson,” which Holmes uses 78 times in the Canon, and the reciprocal “my dear Holmes,” which Watson uses only 16 times. In recent years, there has been a positive explosion of fictional works portraying a gay relationship between the two men, although little of it has been published in traditional book form. An important exception is Kissing Sherlock Holmes (2011) by T. D. McKinney and Terry Wylis. In a rhythm not completely different from that of the heterosexually oriented The Sign of the Four, this book finds Watson and Holmes’s love scenes alternating with de- velopments in an investigation of espionage at a country house. Much of the gradually unfolding case depends on Holmes’s (and sometimes Watson’s) reading of personalities and human rela- tions, including same-sex affairs, but there are also concrete clues and plausible suspects. 8 Not in print but in the electronic world, there are literally thousands of Sherlock Holmes stories that work from the same premise. Betsy Rosenblatt, writing in the Baker Street Journal in 2012, explained “fan fiction” or fanfic and observed, “Stories fall broadly into three genres, based on the character relationships depicted. Slash stories involve a same-sex relationship, usually imposed by the fan author and based on perceived homosocial or homoerotic subtext in the source material.” The bulk of fanfic is made available to its avid readers through web repositories, par- ticularly the Archive of Our Own (ao3.org). As of late July 2014, AO3 offered 1,240 stories about male-male relationships (presum- ably nearly all of them Holmes and Watson) grounded in the Can- on, and a remarkable 36,150 male-male stories based on the Sherlock and John (not, customarily, Holmes and Watson) of the BBC’s Sherlock television series. The latter are known among fans as “Johnlock” fics. Some include detective investigations in their plots, though many do not. It is difficult to spend much time in discussion of the BBC in- carnation of Sherlock Holmes without running into the issue of same-sex attraction. From the first episode in 2010, A Study in Pink, a running joke in the series has been the need for Watson (portrayed by Martin Freeman) to deny that he is sexually in- volved with Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) or shares his bedroom. More recent episodes have hinted at same-sex involvement with Moriarty (Andrew Scott) as well, and The Empty Hearse (2013) included some brief male-male scenes, ostensibly as ex- cerpts from someone’s fantasies. Interviews with the creators of the series, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, have not elicited any promises that things will become more definite, but they have made it clear that they see same-sex affection as an inevitable part of the Holmes–Watson relationship going back to the acknowledged Canon, of which they are whole-souled admirers. In this interpretation, they are not breaking entirely new ground. Billy Wilder, whose sprawling and memorable film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes appeared in 1970, made his Holmes (Robert Stephens) pose as gay to avoid the unwanted at- tentions of a Russian ballerina, and left open the question of whether his orientation was really only a pose. (Watson, undenia- bly a ladies’ man, is outraged at the very idea.) In 1986 in Ameri- 9 can Film Wilder said, “I had wanted to make Holmes a homosexu- al” but, he implied, had to leave matters ambiguous. In 1970, Townsend’s book had not even been published.

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